Dr. Xiaoling Zhang joined City University of Hong Kong in the winter of 2012 following prior academic roles at the University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has written widely on sustainable urbanization and urban redevelopment in China, speculative real estate developers, land use planning/policy and gentrification. She has also engaged in environmental studies, particularly in developers’ behaviour/actions in contributing to social responsibility/sustainable development, energy policy and renewable and sustainable energy use in the built environment. She organized a session on “Social-environmental justice and sustainability” at the prestigious 2015 Association of American Geographers Conference at Chicago, and another session at the 2016 Association of American Geographers Conference at San Francisco titled “Urban inequality and unjust sustainability in China”.
She won the Outstanding Paper Award Winner at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence in 2011. She has published over 100 papers in leading peer-reviewed international academic journals, including 40 SSCI/SCI journal papers for Land Use Policy, Urban Studies, Cities, Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, etc. Dr. Zhang also serves on the editorial board of several academic peer-reviewed journals. She is currently organizing and managing two special issues for the high-impact Journal of Cleaner Production on “Toward a Regenerative Sustainability Paradigm for the Built Environment: from Vision to Reality” and “Transitions to Sustainable Consumption and Production within Cities”.
Xiaoling is continuing her work on gentrification and jiaoyufication featured in China and has a longstanding interest in housing segregation, land expropriation, sustainable urbanism and environmental studies. Her recent theoretical interest has focused on environmental justice and unjust sustainability in China and is currently developing the themes in a paper on ‘Jiaoyufication, or education-led gentrification in Nanjing’ with Qiyan Wu from Shanghai Normal University. Research on housing studies is also in hand with Dr Helen Bao, Department of Land Economics, Cambridge University.
